Due to our time-boxed release cycle, not everything discussed here will necessarily appear in Ubuntu 10.10, but this should provide a reasonable overview of the direction we’re taking.

Presentations

While most of our time at UDS is spent in small group meetings to discuss specific topics, there are also a handful of presentations to convey key information and stimulate creative thinking.

A few of the more memorable ones for me were:

• Mark Shuttleworth talked about the desktop, in particular the introduction of the new Unity shell for Ubuntu Netbook Edition
• Fanny Chevalier presented Diffamation, a tool for visualizing and navigating the history of a document in a very flexible and intuitive way
• Rick Spencer talked about the development process for 10.10 and some key changes in it, including a greater focus on meeting deadlines for freezes (and making fewer exceptions)
• Stefano Zacchiroli, the current Debian project leader, gave an overview of how Ubuntu and Debian developers are working together today, and how this could be improved. He has posted a summary on the debian-project mailing list.

The talks were all recorded, though they may not all be online yet.

Foundations

The Foundations team provides essential infrastructure, tools, packages and processes which are central to the development of all Ubuntu products. They make it possible for the desktop and server teams to focus on their areas of expertise, building on a common base system and development procedures.

Highlights from their track:

• Early on in the week, they conducted a retrospective to discuss how things went during the 10.04 cycle and how we can improve in the future
• One of their major projects has been about revision control for all of Ubuntu’s source code, and they talked last week about what’s next
• We’re aiming to provide btrfs as an install-time option in 10.10
• In order to keep Ubuntu moving forward, the foundations team is always on the lookout for stale bits which we don’t need to keep around anymore. At UDS, they discussed culling unattended packages, retiring the IA64 and SPARC ports and other spring cleaning
• There was a lot of discussion about Upstart, including its further development, implications for servers, desktops and the kernel, and the migration of server init scripts to upstart jobs
• After maintaining two separate x86 boot loaders for years, it looks like we may be ready to replace isolinux with GRUB2 on Ubuntu CDs

Desktop

The desktop team manages both Desktop Edition and Netbook Edition, on a mission to provide a top-notch experience to users across a range of client computing devices.

Highlights from their track:

• A key theme for 10.10 is to help developers to create applications for Ubuntu, by providing a native development environment, improving Quickly, improving desktopcouch, making it easier to get started with desktopcouch, and enabling developers to deliver new applications to Ubuntu users continuously
• With more and more touch screen devices appearing, Ubuntu will grow some new features to support touch oriented applications
• The web browser is a staple application for Ubuntu, and as such we are always striving for the best experience for our users. The team is looking ahead to Chromium, using apport to improve browser bug reports, and providing a web-oriented document capability via Zoho
• Building on work done in 10.04, we will aim to make simple things simple for basic photo editing
• Security-conscious users may rest easier knowing that the X window system will run without root privileges where kernel modesetting is supported

Server/Cloud

The server team is charging ahead with making Ubuntu the premier server OS for cloud computing environments.

Highlights from their track:

• Providing more powerful tools for managing Ubuntu in EC2 and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud infrastructure, including boot-time configuration, image and instance management, and kernel upgrades
• Improving Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud by adding new Eucalyptus features (such as LXC container support, monitoring, rapid provisioning, and load balancing. If you ever wanted to run a UEC demo from a USB stick, that’s possible too.
• Providing packaged solutions for cloud building blocks such as hadoop and pig, Drupal, ehcache, Spring, various NOSQL databases, web frameworks, and more
• Providing turn-key solutions for free software applications like Alfresco and Kolab
• Making Puppet easier to deploy, easier to configure, and easier to scale in the cloud

ARM

Kiko Reis gave a talk introducing ARM and the corresponding opportunity for Ubuntu. The ARM team ran a full track during the week on all aspects of their work, from the technical details of the kernel and toolchain, to the assembly of a complete port of Netbook Edition 10.10 for several ARM platforms.

Kernel

The kernel team provided essential input and support for the above efforts, and also held their own track where they selected 2.6.35 as their target version, agreed on a variety of changes to the Ubuntu kernel configuration, and created a plan for providing backports of newer kernels to LTS releases to support deployment on newer hardware.

Security

Like the kernel team, the security team provided valuable input into the technical plans being developed by other teams, and also organized a security track to tackle some key security topics such as clarifying the duration of maintenance for various collections of packages, and the ongoing development of AppArmor and Ubuntu’s AppArmor profiles.

QA

The QA team focuses on testing, test automation and bug management throughout the project. While quality is everyone’s responsibility, the QA team helps to coordinate these activities across different teams, establish common standards, and maintain shared infrastructure and tools.

Highlights from their track include:

• There was a strong sense of broadening and deepening our testing efforts, mobilizing testers for specific testing projects, streamlining the ISO testing process by engaging Ubuntu derivatives and fine-tuning ISO test cases, and reactivating the community-based laptop testing program
• In support of this effort, there will be projects to improve test infrastructure, including enabling tests to target specific hardware and tracking test results in Launchpad
• There is a continuous effort to improve high-volume processing of bug reports, and two focus areas for this cycle will be tracking regressions (as these are among the most painful bugs for users) and improving our response to kernel bugs (as the kernel faces some special challenges in bug management)

Design

The design team organized a track at UDS for the first time this cycle, and team manager Ivanka Majic gave a presentation to help explain its purpose and scope.

Toward the end of the week, I joined in a round table discussion about some of the challenges faced by the team in engaging with the Ubuntu community and building support for their work. This is a landmark effort in mating professional design with free software community, and there is still much to learn about how to do this well.

Community

The community track discussed the usual line-up of events, outreach and advocacy programs, organizational tools, and governance housekeeping for the 10.10 cycle, as well as goals for improving the translation of Ubuntu and related resources into many languages.

One notable project is an initiative to aggressively review patches submitted to the bug tracker, to show our appreciation for these contributions by processing them more quickly and completely.

In my new talk, Ubuntu Inside Out, I spoke about:

• What Ubuntu is about, and where it came from
• Some of the challenges we face as a growing project with a large community
• Some ways in which we’re addressing those challenges
• How to get involved in Ubuntu and help
• What’s coming next in Ubuntu

The organizers have made a video available if you’d like to watch it (WordPress.com won’t let me embed it here).

Afterward, Calyx and I wandered around Istanbul, with the help of our student guide, Oğuzhan. We don’t speak any Turkish, apart from a few vocabulary words I learned on the way to Turkey, so we were glad to have his help as we visited restaurants, cafes and shops, and wandered through various neighborhoods. We enjoyed a variety of delicious food, and the unexpected company of many friendly stray cats.

It was only a brief visit, but I was grateful for the opportunity to meet the local free software community and to see some of the city.

James gave a great overview of the Ubuntu distributed development project, which has the ambitious goal of providing a homogeneous view of all of the source code for Ubuntu packages using Launchpad and Bazaar. This includes modeling the relationships between the versions of the code in Debian and further upstream, which is complicated by the use of different revision control systems, patch systems, and so on.

At this stage, most of the source code for Ubuntu and Debian is available through the system, and developers can freely branch from it and request merges. It works the same way for all packages, so developers only need to learn one toolset and workflow. We hope that this will lower the barrier to entry for contributing to Ubuntu, as well as make it easier to share patches between Ubuntu, Debian and upstream.

Timo Hoenig: Extending the scope of mobile devices

Timo reviewed how mobile devices have evolved over the past 40 years, citing dramatic improvements in compute power, memory, bandwidth and so on, but comparatively small improvement in battery life (several orders of magnitude less). Thus, he sees power management and related technologies as important to the further advancement of the category. He specifically identified network links as a key consideration, as they consume a great deal of power, and have continued to do so with newer generations of technology. Local power management, he says, is not sufficient, and we need to take a network-aware view.

He introduced the concept of an “early bird” connector, which acts as a supervisor for a mobile device. It communicates with remote network nodes on its behalf, and takes decisions about when and whether to wake up the mobile device. He estimated a 12% power savings by offloading processing to such a device, using a simple model of power consumption. The early bird would run on another system on the network, presumably without the same power constraints (like a proxy server).

Sam Vilain: Linux Containers

Sam detailed the LXC implementation of containers for Linux. In contrast with vserver, it seems to offer a much simpler interface. Because of this, it has been comparatively straightforward to merge into the Linux kernel mainline.

LXC uses existing Linux kernel facilities to group processes within containers into control groups, which can then be used to control access and scheduling of resources (network, CPU, storage, etc.). Each resource type has a namespace similar in principle to what chroot() provides for filesystems. Since all of the hardware is visible to a single kernel, there can be a great deal of flexibility in how resources are allocated. For example, a given network device and CPU can be dedicated to a container.

Usefully for system administration and diagnostics, all of these resources can be directly accessed from the host without stopping or shutting down guests.

After the introductory session (which included an amusing video about Wellington), I attended Emma Jane Hogbin’s talk “Version Control for Mere Mortals” which was an introduction to version control concepts and how to start using it.

The sun finally came out, so today has been warm and bright, a proper summer day. It’s too bad I’ll now be cooped up inside conference rooms for the rest of my stay here.

I stopped in briefly into another talk to learn something about Gearman, and then attended Martin Krafft’s talk on vcs-pkg.org, which is exploring the application of version control to the problem of package maintenance in Linux distributions. One of the hard problems in this space is that there are two alternative ways of modeling packages, both of which are in active use and have distinct advantages and disadvantages: a sequence of patches, and a graph (DAG) of revisions. Inter-operation between systems which use different models is not straightforward.

I had lunch at Mac’s Brewery on the waterfront and talked mainly about version control, Bazaar in particular.